The first thing I noticed about Baldur’s Gate 3 was how good it looked. I saw the moist skin of a Mindflayer as it strolled around my prison cell. I watched on, immobile, as he implanted a fanged worm in my retina, no doubt chewing on my optic nerve as we speak. I saw every glint of enamel in the beast’s tiny, gruesome maw as it condemned me to a fate worse than death. Then I noticed how quiet my PC was.
That may seem like a weird thing to notice, but my PC doesn’t run quiet. I built it myself and have upgraded it on numerous occasions, but I don’t have the time to dive into the BIOS on a weekly basis or make sure every piece is functioning to the best of its ability. I’m rocking an RTX 3070 under the hood, so it’s packing plentiful power and runs most games well, but it can get a bit loud when doing so.
I’m in the attic at home when I work and game, so it’s warm. The sun shines through my window from about 11am and by the time I clock out at six it’s a bona fide oven. I could cook an egg on my windowsill, and my poor old desktop has to work at full throttle to keep cool. These conditions aren’t ideal, but it trucks on and the LCD screen on my liquid cooling system keeps things in the 50s or low 60s (centigrade, obviously) even when playing seriously taxing games.
The trade off for this is that my fans are going like the clappers. So loud that I often can’t hear the doorbell, although that’s in part because I’m on the third floor, too. The hum is noticeable even when I’ve got one too many Chrome tabs open, and yet I was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 in complete silence.
This is a game with stunning graphics, beautifully rendered lifelike character models and sprawling maps filled with uncountable interactable items. And my PC was silent. Quieter than silent. I heard the wind whistling through the grass in my freshly-mowed lawn. I heard a bird singing to its friends from across the way. Then a train rushed past and woke me from that ridiculous daydream, but you get the picture. Baldur’s Gate 3 is ridiculously well optimised.
To test my theory, I booted it up on the Steam Deck too. While the portable PC’s battery is still a major sticking point for me, the fact that a game as massive as Baldur’s Gate 3 has been Deck Verified was astonishing to me. The verification system isn’t the be all and end all, though – I’ve played games that are thoroughly broken on the console despite that little green tick next to their name – so I withheld my judgement.
Larian has achieved a feat of gargantuan proportions. I’m fairly sure the developer absconded from our earthly plane and landed in Faerûn to enlist the help of the fantasy continent’s actual magicians in order to get this huge, detailed game running on the Deck’s hardware. Heck, I think Larian is skilled enough to get this game running on an original Switch at this rate. The frame rate is a little lower, admittedly, and the graphical fidelity is too., but the smaller screen on the Deck compared to my desktop’s ultrawide monitor means that you don’t really notice these things. Mostly, you’re just struck with awe as you marvel at the sorcery unfolding before your very eyes.
This isn’t a game that’s on rails. The graphics don’t lean into a stylised art style to ease performance. Baldur’s Gate 3 offers more solutions to every problem than any game I’ve ever played. I’m trying not to use guides for my first playthrough, but occasionally I’ve looked up aids after completing puzzles to see if I did so optimally, and the number of possibilities is endless. Even the chapel in the earliest stage of the game has four possible entrances, only two of which I noticed initially.
I have no idea what wizardry Larian performed to get Baldur’s Gate 3 running this well on such hardware, what sacrifices (human or otherwise) it made to achieve this. But one thing’s for certain: when checking to see how well optimised this colossal game is, every single dev rolled a nat 20.